Spoilers live in Wendimoor too!
Welcome back to the delightfully insane world of Dirk Gently, still in progress! To talk about the wonderfully zany show with any kind of detail means massive amounts of spoilers, proving that everything really is connected in Dirk’s version of the world, so grab your scissor-sword and prepare to go fulfill the prophecy and rescue everyone in Wendimoor!
What, and perhaps where also, is Wendimoor, you ask? We’re getting ahead of ourselves, because first the gang has to troop off to investigate some weird-ass happenings in the oddly-named town of Bergsberg, Montana. Some rather old dead bodies in a car in a tree, the house of portals, a really-real-kind-of flying purple people eater, some actual otherworldly magic, and even a prophecy about Dirk himself are all leading to some really out-there conclusions, even for holistic detectives. But essentially, Wendimoor is a make-believe entire other world that one can get to from some portals located in the weird house, and it’s from Wendimoor that the prophecy about Dirk Gently saving The Boy and therefore the whole world, comes from!
Blackwing, that super-secret black-hat ops group that likes to kidnap people of extraordinary abilities and lock them up, ostensibly for the good of the world, is still around being all nefarious and junk. They had Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett) in their holding facility, they had him right there, and he literally disappeared through his own bed! Needless to say, the redoubtable leader Friedkin (Dustin Milligan) is beginning to tear his hair out over all this supernatural bunk that he just doesn’t understand at all! And his best way to fix things, is to talk long and hard with perhaps the smartest guy in the whole Blackwing holding facility, Bart’s old friend Ken (Mpho Koaho).
What is Bart (Fiona Dourif) off doing? She’s trying to avoid the razor-blade-holistic-assassin role the universe seems to ordain for her, showing up yes but hardly killing anyone she doesn’t have to. Everyone is leery whenever Bart shows up, knowing her reputation, especially the newest Blackwing operative, inevitably called Mr. Priest (Alan Tudyk), but also the peoples of Wendimoor who begin crossing her path, like Panto (Christopher Russell) the pink-haired heir to the family Trost, who encounters Bart when he crossed over to this world.
Okay so Amanda (Hannah Marks) and Flower-Boy have been looking for their Rowdy 3 brothers who are of course being held by Blackwing, to try and bust them out somehow. It takes quite a bit of fumble and downright magickery to get there, but eventually Amanda gets tossed to Wendimoor herself, and she begins another journey of mysticism and greatness the likes of which perhaps only Dirk in his powers could even fathom. But wait, it doesn’t work that way, right?
Everyone is after the titular hero of this second season, and I do mean everyone. There’s a prophecy in Wendimoor, that Dirk Gently will free The Boy and save everyone, especially those awful feuding Trosts and Dengdamors. But also over in our world, Blackwing is of course after Dirk because hey he escaped somehow, and their operators are closing in fast! Even Sheriff Sherlock Hobbs (Tyler Labine), his wonderfully wacky second Tina Tevetino (Izzie Steele) and newly-appointed deputy Farah Black (Jade Eshete) would really like to talk with Dirk, if for no other reason than to get some damnable explanations about Susie Boreton and what the hell happened with her.
Susie Boreton (Amanda Walsh) is a wild card it turns out, in a couple of different ways. No-one of Wendimoor could have anticipated her involvement with the original Mage (John Hannah) and that damnable prophecy, and once Susie had that wand and that freedom, she did go more than a little bitch-witch crazy with it. It’s not very hard to nudge a downtrodden person into acting out, even as an adult, the problem with doing that is we can never predict how they will act next. And while Susie may have gone way way off the deep end by the end, it’s hard not to smirk at what she did to the former book club that snubbed her. Sadly Susie represents a great deal in a lot of us as 2017 draws to a close, scared and angry and so frustrated that finally, given even the tiniest bit of power, we’re ready to lash out with everything in us – not necessarily the kindest, if silent and implied, commentary.
The real villain in this season could be considered many things – the treatment of Blackwing with their extraordinary prisoners could be arguably said to have led to this pickle of a case in the first place; the Mage who, for all his power, was undone by his ambitions in the end; even Susie Boreton herself, the sad little cripple princess with the gross zombie bear of a husband and a little asshole for a kid. Even Bart, despite her claims that she doesn’t want to be the blade of the universes hand or whatever, has bodies pile up around her more often than not. Yet from among them heroes emerge – Todd (Elijah Wood) and Amanda Brotzman both do their best to use newfound magics to aid their cause, aided by peoples from two very different worlds with extraordinary abilities too, as it turns out.
The power of prophecy, faith and belief, and even the sheer power of a childs imagination, all leading to the interconnectedness of the show, is especially wonderful in this second season of the show. When the innocent joy of the Hero’s Journey is corrupted by cages, by rules and requirements and expectations of results, it can turn into something very dark. And Todd is unfortunately right when he accuses Dirk of acting rather childishly, but then again, his gentle soul and mostly-unshakable faith in the general goodness of the universe, is what never fails to solve a case in the end.
The tiny details of this new season of ‘Dirk Gently’ – the pink hair, the childs toys as working weapons, that damnable squeakie toy that actually isn’t one, and oh so much more, are what really make the show shine in that extra-cheeky British way.
You do yourself a sheer fantastical disservice if you don’t visit Wendimoor with season two of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency on BBC America!